Old school tied

FIRST day of the school holidays, though it’s 25 years since officially he retired, Eddie Roberts and a few of his cronies are gathered in Richmond Conservative Club to toast his 80th birthday.

On the wall there’s a portrait of the Queen. Either side are pictures of William Hague (who’s sent a birthday card) and David Cameron (who probably hasn’t).

Michael Gove won’t have written, either, though the Education Secretary certainly should. In an age when most teachers decline involvement in out-of-hours sport, Eddie remains utterly devoted to it.

It’s a dedication yet more remarkable because, on Boxing Day 1993, an ambulance crew had three times to re-start his heart with a defibrillator – he’d supposed the chest pain a little seasonal over-indulgence.

Though he now has a pacemaker – “I think it’s king-size” – and though he suffers from 80-year-old knees, the guy simply runs and runs. “If you give kids time, they’ll give you time.

It’s about offering them whatever chances that sport allows, I just happen, quite passionately, to believe that it offers a lot,” he says. “Really, I’m just a facilitator.”

The 50-year awards are well behind him. Held across North Yorkshire, but particularly in the sprawling Hambleton and Richmondshire districts, the portfolio of current positions is a little uncertain because he retires, or semi-retires, or cries wolf about retiring, quite frequently.

Still he’s up to the academics in administration, still out on the sports field in all weathers, still walking the walk if no longer chalking the chalk.

Eddie Roberts is old school; Eddie Roberts is a class, class act.

HE’S from Anglesey, a proud Welshman. Edna, his wife, grew up in Rosedale, North Yorkshire. “She goes up the wall sometimes when I tell her I’m not retiring after all, but she can’t talk. She tries to keep me in check but she’s involved in more than I am, treasurer of all sorts.

“Often we go our own ways all day, but that’s fine. It gives us something to talk about at night.”

His first teaching appointment was at South Bank, near Middlesbrough, in 1957. “The kids were brilliant.

South Bank had a stability in those days, their dads worked at Smith’s Dock or Head Wrightson’s or wherever. Unfortunately, that’s disappeared.

He also played football for Lealholm, near Whitby, and sang with the Apollo Male Voice Choir on Teesside – neither, he suspects, as well as he could have done.

“I haven’t achieved anything, really.

I could probably have played a better standard of football, I could probably have done better with the singing, but it was difficult because of all the time with the kids. Personally, I’ve done bugger all. The pleasure I get is from seeing the kids enjoy themselves.

“What you have to do with kids is start every day with a clean sheet.

You tell them off, you play hell with them, in the old days you’d cane them, but you always start afresh.

I’ve never had a kid walk out on me; there’s no point in doing something unless you try to do it properly.”

He moved to Richmond School in 1967, one of his first charges Steve Holbrook, who played schools football for England and subsequently joined Hull City and Darlington. “It was amazing,” recalls Eddie. “82,000 people in Wembley and Stephen was brilliant that day.”

He finished his career at Rosedale Comprehensive in Colburn, near Catterick Garrison. “It was geography really, but I just enjoyed football and other sports. Happily, I still do.”

He was Conservative Club secretary and for years ran a couple of local domino leagues, though there weren’t too many school pupils in that.

HE hadn’t wanted to talk about himself at all, rather about Easingwold school pupils Matthew Fisher and Tom Somers, both of whom excel.

Last month, standing 6ft 2in, but aged only 15 years and 212 days, Matthew played for Yorkshire in the Yorkshire Bank 40 match with Leicestershire at Scarborough – obliged to no great disappointment to postpone his GCSE French oral and the youngest person to play competitive county cricket since the war.

He took 1-40 in seven overs and was run out for ten. Bowling at up to 80mph, he’s already taken 6-25 for the second team – against Leicestershire, too.

Tom’s now 16, a runner miles ahead of his time. A member of the City of York Athletic Club, he leads UK under-17 rankings in both 100m, a personal best of 10.68, and 200m with a pb of 21.41. In June he was fourth in the World Youth Games 200m.

“They receive all sorts of specialist coaching now, but their interest was nurtured at school,” says Eddie.

“There are still some wonderfully committed sports masters.”

He refuses to criticise those who now seem not to work weekends.

“Times have changed, teaching has changed. In the old days if you had looking after football on your CV it would really have meant something.

Now it doesn’t. There’s so much more paperwork, that’s what comes first now.”

The youngest county championship cricketer, incidentally, was Royston Gabe-Jones, three months short of his 16th birthday when chosen for Glamorgan, almost inevitably against Leicestershire, in 1922. He scored six not out in his only innings and was never picked again.

WHAT none can understand, in Richmond Conservative Club and for many miles beyond, is how such commitment to sport and to young people has never been more widely recognised.

There was a Buckingham Palace garden party once –“I fell in the bathroom the day before, had to attend in a wheelchair” – but no higher acknowledgment.

“It’s funny isn’t it,” says one of the lads. “All those years...”

Eddie insists that that’s not what it’s about. He’s done all next year’s fixtures, organised the cup draws, is working on the presentations. (“Do you remember that time I got Jack Charlton for £300 – 166 people in.

Fabulous.”) These days, of course, he feels the cold more easily, the bitterest of all a morning at Saltburn when he and fellow retired teacher and school sports stalwart Adrian Grayson had to take turns to seek shelter in the car.

He drains his birthday pint of Old Seadog. “I don’t do it for recognition, I don’t do it to get my name in the paper,” says Eddie. “I do it because I love it.”

JOHN Atkinson, president of Shildon FC and among the most familiar and most popular men in the Northern League, was 80 the following day. A former Middlesbrough season ticket holder, disenchanted during Steve MacLaren’s reign, John still works most days at the family joinery business in Aycliffe. Like Eddie, he is to be wished very happy days.